Laughingstock

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Freakishly Hyperintelligent
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If Illinois wasn't so bad, this would be a Nebraska 1983 situation. Minnesota and Illinois have traded places in the B1G hierarchy.
 

Pathetic showing today. I will stand by them but I hope we see some improvement soon.
 





I used to watch games live and then my chest started hurting during games from stress. That never happens when I watch the Vikings. My wife decided that the Gophers were bad for my health. Now I DVR the games and only watch if the Gophers after I know the score. I look to see what the score is on my phone. I will watch it even if they lose close. However, will not watch crap like today. When I know the score ahead of time I don't get the chest pains anymore. I guess the Gophers are not worth getting a heart attack over.
 

Illinois is whooping their ass in every aspect of this game, and Illinois is not good.
 

If Illinois wasn't so bad, this would be a Nebraska 1983 situation. Minnesota and Illinois have traded places in the B1G hierarchy.

Illinois has always had a higher place in the big ten hierarchy than us. In the last 20 years they have a big ten title and rose bowl. I’d love to change places with them.
 

Fleck needs to change his best.

A bunch of cheap rhetoric get's us beat by terrible teams. There is no sugar coating this. big play after big play, means people are not doing their assignments.

We lack discipline. That is all head coach. In two years their discipline has dropped off a cliff.
 



Illinois has always had a higher place in the big ten hierarchy than us. In the last 20 years they have a big ten title and rose bowl. I’d love to change places with them.

That's ancient history. We're playing Lovie Smith's Illini. They suck. So we suck even more.
 

That's ancient history. We're playing Lovie Smith's Illini. They suck. So we suck even more.

We would’ve never lost to Illinois with the last coach.
Or the coach before that.
Or the coach before that.

Clearly we are at an all time low.
 


We would’ve never lost to Illinois with the last coach.
Or the coach before that.
Or the coach before that.

Clearly we are at an all time low.

We never lost to Illinois before.
 



We might be the worst team in the Big Ten. Wish we played Rutgers so we could know for sure.
 

Minnesota and Rutgers are the clear, clear, clear worst teams in the Big Ten. Not even close.

I'm frankly shocked that we beat Indiana. Probably should have lost, the way we pissed the lead away.


Easily finish the season 4-8. No bowl game. Regression from 2017 ... big regression from 2016.
 

Minnesota and Rutgers are the clear, clear, clear worst teams in the Big Ten. Not even close.

I'm frankly shocked that we beat Indiana. Probably should have lost, the way we pissed the lead away.


Easily finish the season 4-8. No bowl game. Regression from 2017 ... big regression from 2016.
Yeah, well, violence is out of the question.
 


Easier to overlook when you have other wins.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

We would’ve never lost to Illinois with the last coach.
Or the coach before that.
Or the coach before that.

Clearly we are at an all time low.

Is that sarcasm? We lost to Illinois during our pretty good 2014 season. Losing to Illinois (even badly) isn't by itself such a low. The real low is the cumulative effect of this Big Ten season. We have one win and our closest loss is by two touchdowns.
 


The mental gymnastics it takes to justify this team is ridiculous to all but about 20 people who live on this site. Congrats you are in rare company.

It's not that hard really. You just have to have a memory of Kill's team that lost to Illinois in a real dud.
It seems the majority of Gopher fans who are hating on Fleck forget that we lost games before Fleck got here.
 

After the Gophers got embarrassed in Nebraska, Fleck was questioned on his KFAN show about how he responds to fans who are frustrated about the season. Fleck said that he didn't understand why there was frustration, as the Gophers were picked to finish 12th out of 14 teams. Now that they got badly beaten and outright humiliated by a team that was predicted to finish below them in the standings, I wonder if Fleck will be able to comprehend why fans might possibly be frustrated.
 

The mental gymnastics it takes to justify this team is ridiculous to all but about 20 people who live on this site. Congrats you are in rare company.

I suggest you read what I was responding to before putting your foot in your cavernous mouth.
 

We lack discipline. That is all head coach. In two years their discipline has dropped off a cliff.

In the last two years the Gophers are among the leaders in the nation in fewest penalties and penalty yards per game. That’s kinda the epitome of discipline.

They have some issues on defense right now, particularly in the secondary, but team discipline is NOT something I would consider a major issue.
 

In the last two years the Gophers are among the leaders in the nation in fewest penalties and penalty yards per game. That’s kinda the epitome of discipline.

They have some issues on defense right now, particularly in the secondary, but team discipline is NOT something I would consider a major issue.

At this point I would be ok with the defense committing more penalties. It's a better option than letting the ball carrier score on a 50+ yard play.
 

A lot of this goes back to expectations. Fleck came to MN off a 13-1 season at WMU. He was billed as one of the top young, up-and-coming coaching prospects in the country.

Right or wrong, fair or not, people had expectations that Fleck was coming in to take the program to a higher level.

Fleck apparently saw things differently. Instead of seeing an OK program that needed a boost to get to the next level, Fleck saw a program with systemic problems that needed to be torn down to the foundations and re-built.

If he would have come out and said that on Day 1, some people would have been upset at the time - but I think fewer people would be upset now.

If Fleck would have said this was a total re-build, and there was a good chance that it would take 4 years just to get the program back to a respectable level, again, people would have griped. ticket sales may have taken a hit. but the current season would have been placed in context.

Some of us thought we were hiring a guy to build an addition onto the house. He came in and tore the house down. That's not what some people expected, or thought we were paying for. Hence the disappointment and second-guessing.

Now, you can argue that the fans are the ones who made the mistake. That Fleck was signalling to us what to expect, and we missed those signals. I would say that those signals were not clear and loud enough to be easily understood - and got lost in all the verbiage, slogans and catch phrases.

Either way, there was clearly a huge disconnect between what some people expected, and what Fleck planned to do. That comes down to communications.
 

Coach DID say that things would get worse before they get better. After 8-5 and 9-4 seasons I hoped for better sooner. Or not this much worse before his rendition of better.
 
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A lot of this goes back to expectations. Fleck came to MN off a 13-1 season at WMU. He was billed as one of the top young, up-and-coming coaching prospects in the country.

Right or wrong, fair or not, people had expectations that Fleck was coming in to take the program to a higher level.

Fleck apparently saw things differently. Instead of seeing an OK program that needed a boost to get to the next level, Fleck saw a program with systemic problems that needed to be torn down to the foundations and re-built.

If he would have come out and said that on Day 1, some people would have been upset at the time - but I think fewer people would be upset now.

If Fleck would have said this was a total re-build, and there was a good chance that it would take 4 years just to get the program back to a respectable level, again, people would have griped. ticket sales may have taken a hit. but the current season would have been placed in context.

Some of us thought we were hiring a guy to build an addition onto the house. He came in and tore the house down. That's not what some people expected, or thought we were paying for. Hence the disappointment and second-guessing.

Now, you can argue that the fans are the ones who made the mistake. That Fleck was signalling to us what to expect, and we missed those signals. I would say that those signals were not clear and loud enough to be easily understood - and got lost in all the verbiage, slogans and catch phrases.

Either way, there was clearly a huge disconnect between what some people expected, and what Fleck planned to do. That comes down to communications.

I get the sense that this year's results weren't really expected by Fleck either...injuries to multiple key players have made it even more difficult.
 

Indiana is the real laughing stock. Worse defensive coordinator in football history pretty much shut them down for 3 quarters.
 

Does a running QB have anything to do with it? Is Smith "trying too hard" or something to that affect, to account for a running QB?

We did "better", in a sense, against Indiana and Iowa, which had more traditional QBs ... right? I can't recall now, off the top of my head. I think Maryland had a running QB too? Or maybe the wrinkle with them was their "jet sweep option" scheme on offense.


Maybe he (Smith) is just putting too much on his LB and DB's plates?? Taking wild stabs in the dark, here.
 




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